6 ms·

"So why not pick the overextended mess we started with." What's the starting point? Javascript or assembly? NaCl gets closer to the original starting point (

by niggler 14y ago

"So why not pick the overextended mess we started with." What's the starting point? Javascript or assembly? NaCl gets closer to the original starting point (which predates javascript by more than 20 years)

hosay123 14y ago
In the context of manipulating symbols on an infinitely long piece of tape, sure, but in the context of the web we don't "have" NaCl and there's sufficiently plausible technical and political resistance that we're probably never going to. At various points he talks about how a fresh byte code would address some of the issues raised, and certainly from a full time compiler engineer's perspective, some pristine representation and a handful of tree-walks are obviously going to appeal to his academic side. I just doubt any such perfectly forward-compatible ideal representation will ever exist that can cater to all camps and survive the test of time, because to my knowledge such a thing has never existed. So why abandon our current path for something that'll inevitably end up as ugly as JS in the long term, when we already have something as ugly as JS.
- pifflesnort 14y ago
  > ... there's sufficiently plausible technical and political resistance that we're probably never going to. Resistance that you contribute to with almost every article that touches on NaCL, yes. It's self-fulfilling prophesy and a circular argument: "We can't adopt NaCL because nobody will ever adopt NaCL" -- say the people responsible for choosing whether to adopt NaCL. > So why abandon our current path for something that'll inevitably end up as ugly as JS in the long term, when we already have something as ugly as JS. Why is this the "inevitable" result?
  - hosay123 14y ago
    Show me a counterexample, that's all I ask. I'd give all the rhetoric in the world for a single damned counterexample of a program format that's lasted since the 80s. That's what's at stake. Instead we have a company that throws specs over the wall like they're teenaged nerds that have just discovered Pascal's pack function, a company that pushed SPDY on everyone despite it relying on a draft SSL feature that got rejected at the IETF (and in the space of 2/3 years we now have three HTTP variants - and why? Because 3 years ago it shaved 1ms off a maps.google.com request). Did you even take a look at the original WebSocket spec? It worked in terms of comparing the entire start of the HTTP request using memcmp()! Regardless of my opinion of NaCl, this is stuff that should be getting defined slowly and in the open by bearded old men that have spent their lives in glacial, trusted industries like telecoms, or just about any other mature technology industry. Not a throng of Java graduates who think they're changing the world by continually dumping crap specs over the wall and paying for subsidized articles to promote them.
    - niggler 14y ago
      "a throng of Java graduates who think they're changing the world by continually dumping crap specs over the wall and paying for subsidized articles to promote them." Based on the media hype surrounding asm.js, it really sounds like mozilla fits the description
      - shardling 14y ago
        >Based on the media hype surrounding asm.js, it really sounds like mozilla fits the description Wait, what? I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. If you seriously think Mozilla has payed for articles about themselves, you've gone off the deep end. I know that I personally became aware of asm.js because of an offhand comment Eich made on HN. I posted that link on both reddit and HN, which I guess was the start of the hype, so if you could let me know where to collect my Mozilla money I'd be obliged. :)
    - pifflesnort 14y ago
      > Show me a counterexample, that's all I ask. I'd give all the rhetoric in the world for a single damned counterexample of a program format that's lasted since the 80s. That's what's at stake. ELF was defined in the late 80s/early 90s as part of SVR4. COFF was defined as part of SVR3. Both still exist today. The JVM bytecode was defined in 1995 and has been evolved compatibly. I'm curious, though. Do you require the same longevity of web formats that were defined in the 90s? Things have changed quite a bit, and attempting to browse the modern web with a 90s browser is futile. Given that, I don't really understand what you're arguing for. > Regardless of my opinion of NaCl, this is stuff that should be getting defined slowly and in the open by bearded old men that have spent their lives in glacial, trusted industries like telecoms, or just about any other mature technology industry. Us 'bearded old men' aren't on the web, and its only improvements like SPDY, WebSockets, and NaCL that have made me the slightest bit interested in the web as an application platform.
      - pyre 14y ago
        > attempting to browse the modern web with a > 90s browser is futile I think the inverse is what we're talking about. Will we be able to browse NaCl sites in future browsers (possibly after an architecture change away from x86)? As it stands, we would probably be able to browse a 90's site on modern browsers. It sounds like if NaCl compiles things down to ASM x86 (or really AMD64) (?). If that's true, then it's possible for things to not be forward compatible. I'll admit that it doesn't seem likely, especially after what happened with Itanium and AMD64/x86-64, but we could see things move towards ARM.
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    The actual arguments against NaCl have been reiterated many times, and go well beyond the circular reasoning you suggest is being displayed. Unless you want to argue for the fun of arguing, the polite thing to do is to consider the previous arguments as implicitly included in the current discussion, and interpret other comments as charitably as possible. For the sake of completeness, I'll note one of the biggest detriments of original NaCl: a lack of platform independence.
    - niggler 14y ago
      "a lack of platform independence" Platform independence is not an obvious goal for game developers. If it were, you would see the same game show up in every platform, but that's not what we see. Heck, only recently did we really see games show up for Mac. For high performance contexts, you want to be able to express algorithms in a way that takes full advantage of the hardware, and the lack of homogeneity in hardware demands a platform-dependent solution.
      - coldtea 14y ago
        >Platform independence is not an obvious goal for game developers. The web is not a platform solely for game developers. Run native game code inside a browser why? What exactly do you get over, say, running it natively as a desktop/mobile app and just distributing it over the internet and/or web?
        TheZenPsycho 14y ago
        zero installation.
        rhu86 14y ago
        I wonder what effect it would have on people's ability to pirate it
        TheZenPsycho 14y ago
bcoates 14y ago
By my count Javascript is around 5 years older than amd64. If we had gone with native client back then we'd be stuck with pre-SSE x86 or maybe they'd have been forward-looking and gone with Alpha or Itanium with emulation for "legacy" systems. Also, why the false choice between asm.js and NaCl anyway? The article makes a pretty compelling case for "neither".
- pifflesnort 14y ago
  > By my count Javascript is around 5 years older than amd64. If we had gone with native client back then we'd be stuck with pre-SSE x86 or maybe they'd have been forward-looking and gone with Alpha or Itanium with emulation for "legacy" systems. That's not really how NaCL works. Any instruction that can't break out of the jail can be whitelisted; this includes all versions of SSE. Additionally, PNaCL can be retargeted at as-of-yet unknown architectures. The result is that binaries would have been either shipped as PNaCL-only, or optimized for i386+SSE1 with fallback to PNaCL. As new hardware was shipped, new binaries could be targeted appropriately. This seems reasonable to me; default to portability, provide an option for best-case performance.
  - pcwalton 14y ago
    How do you plan to ensure that authors test and ship working and performant PNaCl binaries if they and their users are always using the native code?
    - pifflesnort 14y ago
      How did Apple developers ship working PPC/m68k binaries? Or PPC/x86 after that, later PPC/x86/x86-64, and armv6/armv7/armv7s on the iPhone?
      - pcwalton 14y ago
        Totally different. In all of those cases, the developers have access to devices that run the hardware, and they have economic incentive to target all of those devices. Whereas with your suggestion, developers ship and test native builds for all of the CPUs on the market, plus one extra "portable" version for posterity, one that no immediate customers will ever use (because they'll be using the native versions for their architecture instead). I suspect developers wouldn't even ship the portable version (too much of a pain), browsers won't optimize it (because nobody will use it), and developers won't test it (because nobody will use it). It's like saying that images are no problem for accessibility on the Web, because designers know to use alt text. Of course they know they should, but we all know what the reality is. A backup "portable" version of an app is like alt text in this way. Some developers would do the right thing; many won't, and the Web will be de facto locked in to x86 and ARM forever.

by niggler 14y ago

hosay123 14y ago

In the context of manipulating symbols on an infinitely long piece of tape, sure, but in the context of the web we don't "have" NaCl and there's sufficiently plausible technical and political resistance that we're probably never going to. At various points he talks about how a fresh byte code would address some of the issues raised, and certainly from a full time compiler engineer's perspective, some pristine representation and a handful of tree-walks are obviously going to appeal to his academic side. I just doubt any such perfectly forward-compatible ideal representation will ever exist that can cater to all camps and survive the test of time, because to my knowledge such a thing has never existed. So why abandon our current path for something that'll inevitably end up as ugly as JS in the long term, when we already have something as ugly as JS.

pifflesnort 14y ago
> ... there's sufficiently plausible technical and political resistance that we're probably never going to. Resistance that you contribute to with almost every article that touches on NaCL, yes. It's self-fulfilling prophesy and a circular argument: "We can't adopt NaCL because nobody will ever adopt NaCL" -- say the people responsible for choosing whether to adopt NaCL. > So why abandon our current path for something that'll inevitably end up as ugly as JS in the long term, when we already have something as ugly as JS. Why is this the "inevitable" result?
- hosay123 14y ago
  Show me a counterexample, that's all I ask. I'd give all the rhetoric in the world for a single damned counterexample of a program format that's lasted since the 80s. That's what's at stake. Instead we have a company that throws specs over the wall like they're teenaged nerds that have just discovered Pascal's pack function, a company that pushed SPDY on everyone despite it relying on a draft SSL feature that got rejected at the IETF (and in the space of 2/3 years we now have three HTTP variants - and why? Because 3 years ago it shaved 1ms off a maps.google.com request). Did you even take a look at the original WebSocket spec? It worked in terms of comparing the entire start of the HTTP request using memcmp()! Regardless of my opinion of NaCl, this is stuff that should be getting defined slowly and in the open by bearded old men that have spent their lives in glacial, trusted industries like telecoms, or just about any other mature technology industry. Not a throng of Java graduates who think they're changing the world by continually dumping crap specs over the wall and paying for subsidized articles to promote them.
  - niggler 14y ago
    "a throng of Java graduates who think they're changing the world by continually dumping crap specs over the wall and paying for subsidized articles to promote them." Based on the media hype surrounding asm.js, it really sounds like mozilla fits the description
    - shardling 14y ago
      >Based on the media hype surrounding asm.js, it really sounds like mozilla fits the description Wait, what? I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. If you seriously think Mozilla has payed for articles about themselves, you've gone off the deep end. I know that I personally became aware of asm.js because of an offhand comment Eich made on HN. I posted that link on both reddit and HN, which I guess was the start of the hype, so if you could let me know where to collect my Mozilla money I'd be obliged. :)
  - pifflesnort 14y ago
    > Show me a counterexample, that's all I ask. I'd give all the rhetoric in the world for a single damned counterexample of a program format that's lasted since the 80s. That's what's at stake. ELF was defined in the late 80s/early 90s as part of SVR4. COFF was defined as part of SVR3. Both still exist today. The JVM bytecode was defined in 1995 and has been evolved compatibly. I'm curious, though. Do you require the same longevity of web formats that were defined in the 90s? Things have changed quite a bit, and attempting to browse the modern web with a 90s browser is futile. Given that, I don't really understand what you're arguing for. > Regardless of my opinion of NaCl, this is stuff that should be getting defined slowly and in the open by bearded old men that have spent their lives in glacial, trusted industries like telecoms, or just about any other mature technology industry. Us 'bearded old men' aren't on the web, and its only improvements like SPDY, WebSockets, and NaCL that have made me the slightest bit interested in the web as an application platform.
    - pyre 14y ago
      > attempting to browse the modern web with a > 90s browser is futile I think the inverse is what we're talking about. Will we be able to browse NaCl sites in future browsers (possibly after an architecture change away from x86)? As it stands, we would probably be able to browse a 90's site on modern browsers. It sounds like if NaCl compiles things down to ASM x86 (or really AMD64) (?). If that's true, then it's possible for things to not be forward compatible. I'll admit that it doesn't seem likely, especially after what happened with Itanium and AMD64/x86-64, but we could see things move towards ARM.
- nitrogen 14y ago
  The actual arguments against NaCl have been reiterated many times, and go well beyond the circular reasoning you suggest is being displayed. Unless you want to argue for the fun of arguing, the polite thing to do is to consider the previous arguments as implicitly included in the current discussion, and interpret other comments as charitably as possible. For the sake of completeness, I'll note one of the biggest detriments of original NaCl: a lack of platform independence.
  - niggler 14y ago
    "a lack of platform independence" Platform independence is not an obvious goal for game developers. If it were, you would see the same game show up in every platform, but that's not what we see. Heck, only recently did we really see games show up for Mac. For high performance contexts, you want to be able to express algorithms in a way that takes full advantage of the hardware, and the lack of homogeneity in hardware demands a platform-dependent solution.
    - coldtea 14y ago
      >Platform independence is not an obvious goal for game developers. The web is not a platform solely for game developers. Run native game code inside a browser why? What exactly do you get over, say, running it natively as a desktop/mobile app and just distributing it over the internet and/or web?
      - TheZenPsycho 14y ago
        zero installation.
        rhu86 14y ago
        I wonder what effect it would have on people's ability to pirate it
        TheZenPsycho 14y ago

bcoates 14y ago

By my count Javascript is around 5 years older than amd64. If we had gone with native client back then we'd be stuck with pre-SSE x86 or maybe they'd have been forward-looking and gone with Alpha or Itanium with emulation for "legacy" systems. Also, why the false choice between asm.js and NaCl anyway? The article makes a pretty compelling case for "neither".

pifflesnort 14y ago
> By my count Javascript is around 5 years older than amd64. If we had gone with native client back then we'd be stuck with pre-SSE x86 or maybe they'd have been forward-looking and gone with Alpha or Itanium with emulation for "legacy" systems. That's not really how NaCL works. Any instruction that can't break out of the jail can be whitelisted; this includes all versions of SSE. Additionally, PNaCL can be retargeted at as-of-yet unknown architectures. The result is that binaries would have been either shipped as PNaCL-only, or optimized for i386+SSE1 with fallback to PNaCL. As new hardware was shipped, new binaries could be targeted appropriately. This seems reasonable to me; default to portability, provide an option for best-case performance.
- pcwalton 14y ago
  How do you plan to ensure that authors test and ship working and performant PNaCl binaries if they and their users are always using the native code?
  - pifflesnort 14y ago
    How did Apple developers ship working PPC/m68k binaries? Or PPC/x86 after that, later PPC/x86/x86-64, and armv6/armv7/armv7s on the iPhone?
    - pcwalton 14y ago
      Totally different. In all of those cases, the developers have access to devices that run the hardware, and they have economic incentive to target all of those devices. Whereas with your suggestion, developers ship and test native builds for all of the CPUs on the market, plus one extra "portable" version for posterity, one that no immediate customers will ever use (because they'll be using the native versions for their architecture instead). I suspect developers wouldn't even ship the portable version (too much of a pain), browsers won't optimize it (because nobody will use it), and developers won't test it (because nobody will use it). It's like saying that images are no problem for accessibility on the Web, because designers know to use alt text. Of course they know they should, but we all know what the reality is. A backup "portable" version of an app is like alt text in this way. Some developers would do the right thing; many won't, and the Web will be de facto locked in to x86 and ARM forever.